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bobwrit points out a story at PC Magazine, from which he extracts "Google has purchased Agnilux, a secretive chip house made up of engineers who architected the heart of the iPad, then left the company. Reuters' PEHub reported the story Tuesday night. A Google spokesman also confirmed the acquisition to PCMag.com. 'We're pleased to welcome the Agnilux team to Google, but we don't have any additional information to share right now,' a Google spokesman said Tuesday night via email."

I don't actually believe that Apple lost a lot of momentum in this defection. In general, it's the folks who had alternative ideas for an architecture that didn't win out that tend to leave. I bet Google eventually gets stuck with something like a chip that has an insane pipeline structure, makes a different power/speed tradeoff (and probably for the worse), or has some other weird bag o'crap bolted to the side.

In addition, there are a *lot* of chip designers still left over from the chip manufacturer layoffs after the crashes of.com and bank that Apple can pick from. When you get right down to it, once the architecture is developed (and, by this, I don't only mean ISA, I also include things like clock/signal distribution, internal bus structure, pipelining strategy, cache structure, etc.) which only takes a small team - in fact, it works better with a small team - it's just moving little mask rectangles around with automated logic generation and, after that, a buttload of QA.

So, even if Apple sues, it's just because (a) Apple like using its lawyers and (b) it kicks Google in the nuts - it really doesn't mean much for Apple's future chip development.

The reality is that Google is not a monolithic entity that does everything poorly. I don't think the search team has much to do with the Android team. They probably don't have many "jacks of all trades", but instead have many small, focused teams that are really good at what they do.

Just because they share the same brand name doesn't mean they all work out of one homogenous brain-pool.